Welcome to the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Today we’re looking at Projects & Tasks.

Projects and Tasks is the part of the NZRT system where you plan, organise, and track your work from start to finish. Whether you’re managing a client engagement, an internal initiative, or a smaller piece of consulting work, this is where you bring it all together — from the initial plan right through to completion.

Let’s start with how a project is structured. Think of it as a tree. At the top you have the project itself — that’s your overarching container for all the work. Underneath that, you break things down into tasks. Each task can be assigned to a specific person, and you can set an estimated number of hours for how long it should take. Then, if a task is complex enough, you can go one level deeper and create sub-tasks underneath it. So for example, you might have a project at the top, then Task One assigned to a team member with ten hours estimated, and underneath that, Task One might have its own sub-tasks — say, research, drafting, and review. Task Two sits alongside it at the same level. This hierarchy lets you get as granular as you need without losing sight of the big picture.

Now let’s talk about what you can actually do with that structure. There are five main feature areas worth knowing about.

First, there’s the Gantt-style timeline view. This gives you a visual representation of your project schedule — you can see which tasks are running in parallel, which ones depend on others finishing first, and how the overall timeline is shaping up. It’s a great way to spot scheduling conflicts or gaps before they become a problem.

Second is time logging and timesheets. As you and your team work through tasks, you log the actual time spent against each one. This feeds directly into the timesheets module, keeping everything connected. You’re not re-entering data in two places — it flows through automatically.

Third, you get budget versus actual tracking for both hours and cost. This is really valuable because it means you can compare what you planned at the start of the project against what’s actually happening. If a task is running over hours, or a project is burning through budget faster than expected, you’ll see that clearly rather than finding out at the very end.

Fourth is billable project invoicing. If you’re working on a client project, you can mark tasks as billable and generate invoices directly from the project. This connects your project management and your finance side, so you’re not copying data across systems or reconciling things manually at month end.

And fifth, you can attach documents to a project. Supporting files, briefs, contracts, reference material — whatever you need to keep close to the work — can live right there alongside the tasks themselves.

Now, Projects and Tasks doesn’t work in isolation. It connects to a few other areas of the system that are worth being aware of.

The Shared Calendar and Agenda ties in with your project timeline, so deadlines and milestones can show up alongside other scheduled events. That helps with visibility across the whole team.

Timesheets, as mentioned, receives the time entries you log against tasks. But the timesheets module also has its own views and reporting, so if you need to look at how time is being spent across multiple projects or across the team as a whole, that’s where you’d go.

And finally, there’s reporting — specifically project profitability reporting. Once your actual hours and costs are tracked against your budget, the reports module can show you whether a project is running at a profit or a loss. For a consultancy like NZRT, this is essential. It tells you whether the work you’re delivering is being captured and billed correctly, and whether your estimates are landing where they should.

So to bring it all together — Projects and Tasks gives you a structured way to break work down into manageable pieces, assign it to the right people, track time and costs as you go, and connect that information through to invoicing and reporting. It’s the central hub for managing delivery, and when used consistently, it gives you a clear picture of where every project stands at any given moment.

That’s it for this episode of the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Thanks for listening.